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Category: China

China, Turkey want diplomacy on Iran

UN Security Council member states China and Turkey have reiterated commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

“We will do everything possible to build trust between Iran and the United States and Iran and the West to avoid a military confrontation and possible sanctions,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying by London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.

Davutoglu went on to call for “more diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran in order to build trust between (all) sides.”

The remarks come one day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an address before the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN headquarters in New York, confronted the United States for refusing to exclude Iran from the list of countries that could become the target of US nukes.

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters on Tuesday that the permanent UNSC member state was in favor of “relevant measures” to help resolve the issue through talks.

“Dialogue and negotiations are the best way out to resolve this issue and relevant discussions are still under way,” she added.

Washington and its allies are rallying support for tougher UNSC sanctions against Iran. However, the imposition of sanctions requires nine affirmative votes including those of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council.

Permanent UNSC member China and temporary members Turkey and Brazil are among the countries that support Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program.

While the West accuses Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program, Tehran has repeatedly rejected the allegation and argues that as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to the peaceful use of the technology for electricity generation and medical research.

President Ahmadinejad offered an itemized proposal to the NPT review conference, calling for measures to limit the power held by nuclear armed states in the UNSC.

Press TV
ZHD/HGH

May 4, 2010
Hundreds Dead in Earthquake in Northwest China

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — A powerful earthquake in northwest China killed at least 300 people, injured 8,000 and left many others buried under debris on Wednesday, Chinese state media reported.

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Zhang Hongshuan/Xinhua, via Reuters

A photo taken by a mobile phone showed destroyed houses after an earthquake hit the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yushu, northwest China’s Qinghai province on Wednesday.

The New York Times

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Zhang Hongshuan/Associated Press

Rubble from destroyed houses fills the streets.

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Zhang Hongshuan/Associated Press

People gathered in open areas after the quake hit.

The quake, which struck at 7:49 a.m. in Qinghai Province, had a magnitude of 7.1 according to China’s earthquake administration.

According to the China Earthquake Networks Center, the earthquake struck in Yushu County, a remote and mountainous area sparsely populated by farmers and herders, most of them ethnic Tibetans. The region is pocked with copper, tin and coal mines and rich in natural gas. A government Web site said the county’s population was around 80,000.

China National Radio said that more than 80 percent of the homes in the area had collapsed but that schools and government buildings had largely remained standing.

Karsum Nyima, an employee of a local television station in Yushu, told the national television broadcaster, CCTV, that the quake had sent people running into the streets.

“All of a sudden, the houses collapsed,” he said. “It was a terrible earthquake. In the park, a Buddhist pagoda fell down. Everyone is in the street in front of their houses. They are trying to find family members.”

In the same broadcast, Wu Yong, an officer in the Chinese Army, said that the road to the airport was impassable and that soldiers were digging out people from collapsed homes by hand.

“The most important thing now is that this place is far from everything, with few accessible rescue troops available,” Mr. Wu said. “I feel like the number of dead and injured will keep going up.”

Local officials said that phone service was limited and that rescue efforts were stymied by a lack of heavy equipment. Medical supplies and tents, they added, were in short supply.

State news media reported that 700 paramilitary officers were already working in the quake zone and that another 3,000 troops would be sent to the area to assist in search and rescue efforts. The civil affairs ministry said it would also send 5,000 tents and 50,000 blankets.

Last August, Golmud was hit by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that destroyed dozens of homes but caused no deaths. Qinghai is an ethnic melting pot of Tibetans, Mongols and Han Chinese. It is adjacent to Sichuan Province, where at least 87,000 people died in a powerful earthquake in 2008.

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

April 14, 2010
Xinjiang – Where China’s Worry Intersects the World

The recent killing of a Uighur terrorist in Afghanistan has brought new focus on the ethnic group in China’s western border region.of Xinjiang. The situation of the Uighurs – an ethnic Turkic, Muslim minority – reveals much about China’s internal conduct and external worries, according to China expert Christopher M. Clarke. Hailing from Xinjiang province, Uighurs have seen their majority in that province erode and income inequality expand as Beijing populated the area with Han Chinese and supported the growth of state-owned enterprises. There is little wonder that violence erupts in the province. But even without such violence, China would still be leery of developments in Xinjiang, which borders a number of unstable Central Asian states as well as Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Plus, the province hosts vast natural resource wealth and many nuclear testing installations. Any one of these situations could add to the vulnerability of the province. China has attempted to ease tensions in the region, cooperating with neighbors over natural resource exploration. But the US military presence in Afghanistan adds a further wrinkle to an already crumpled tapestry. In the end, Xinjiang is likely to remain a sore spot for Beijing as it worries about pressure from all sides regionally and tries to dampen unrest internally. – YaleGlobal

Xinjiang – Where China’s Worry Intersects the World

Regional instability adds to concerns about restive Muslim minority

Christopher M. ClarkeYaleGlobal , 19 March 2010

Boiling anger: A Uighur protester confronts Chinese security forces in Urumqi, July, 2009.

WASHINGTON: The February 15 killing of militant Uighur leader Abdul Haq al-Turkistani by an American drone in the border regions of Pakistan highlights China’s continued sensitivity about its remote and vulnerable western region, Xinjiang. It also brings into focus the role of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region as an international sanctuary for Islamic militants and the reasons for China’s worries about social stability and potential terrorist threats in Xinjiang. China’s neuralgia about security in Xinjiang will continue – and perhaps even increase – as big power competition for influence and resources in Central Asia and its ties to the rest of the world continue to expand.

China’s troubles with the minority Uighurs are not new. But with the break up of the Soviet Union and the rising Islamist Taliban in once Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, the regional dynamic has changed. Since the early 1990s, China has faced recurrent waves of unrest in Xinjiang and widespread acts of violence, some of which seem to have been terrorist acts by disgruntled Uighurs. The 2008 attempted hijacking of an airplane in China by three people armed with flammable liquid was one of the latest – and scariest – examples. There also have been several attacks against perceived Uighur collaborators in China and against Chinese interests outside the country. The capture of Uighurs fighting against coalition forces in Afghanistan, some two dozen of whom were imprisoned in Guantanamo, also indicate that China faces a real threat of terrorist acts against its interests at home and abroad.

China’s neuralgia about security in Xinjiang will continue as big power competition for influence and resources in Central Asia and its ties to the rest of the world continue to expand.

The Chinese, however, have aroused skepticism by dubiously attributing dozens of explosions and incidents of civil unrest to instigation by “East Turkistan terrorist forces.” Officials, for example, blamed an August 2008 attack on a military police unit out for its morning jog, in which 16 officers were killed, on a Uighur terrorist group, despite the fact that the officers apparently were run down by a truck and attacked by a taxi driver and a vegetable vendor, hardly the modus operandi of a sophisticated terrorist organization. Even last July’s massive race riot in Urumqi – set off by rumors that a Uighur woman had been raped and several Uighur men killed by Han Chinese in far-away Guangdong – was labeled as an “organized, violent action against the public” and an act of terrorism.

So, while China does face periodic upsurges in politically motivated violence by Uighurs, one has to ask, why? The answer: Beijing has engaged in a systematic, multi-decade program of marginalizing Uighurs in their own homeland, fostering economic growth that favors the Han majority of eastern China and that encourages the exploitation of Xinjiang’s wealth of natural resources for Han areas. Beijing has organized and encouraged an influx of Han into Xinjiang, changing the ethnic ratio since 1949 from about 5 percent Han to more than 40 percent today. Moreover, Uighur culture and the Muslim religion are contained under tight restrictions. Beijing proudly points out that Xinjiang in recent years has been among the fastest growing economies in the country, with per capita income higher than all regions except China’s southeast coast. Most of that growth, however, has accrued to State-owned enterprises, Han entrepreneurs, or the government; not to Uighurs. And income inequalities there have actually expanded significantly in recent years. The region also suffers from some of the worst environmental degradation in China. It is hardly surprising that frustration occasionally boils over into civil unrest – or that such conditions breed terrorist groups intent on taking action against the regime.

Beijing has engaged in a systematic, multi-decade program of marginalizing Uighurs in their own homeland, fostering economic growth that favors the Han majority.

That many of China’s problems with terrorism and unrest are largely of its own making has reduced international trust and sympathy for the situation. China’s concerns also have both shaped its approach to the broader region and reduced China’s willingness to cooperate with the US in counter-terrorism, negatively affecting the overall US -China relationship.

Xinjiang, more than any other area of China, is strategically vulnerable, partially as a result of its location in one of the most fractious neighborhoods outside the Middle East. Representing one-sixth of China’s territory, Xinjiang is rich in oil, gas, and mineral deposits and contains numerous sensitive military installations, including some of the country’s premier nuclear research and testing facilities. It borders the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, all of which are less than politically stable.*

Complicating China’s relations with the Central Asian states is the fact that as many as 500,000 Uighurs – and sizable populations of other Chinese “minorities” – live across relatively porous borders and engage in extensive trade and contacts. Several of these countries contain anti-China Uighur separatist organizations, both peaceful and terrorist. And China is very afraid of the potential contagion of “color revolutions” from Central Asia – like the 2005 “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan – destabilizing China’s control in Xinjiang. Uighur activities – including violent attacks – have complicated China’s relations with Turkey, a country with which China seeks closer relations but where public and official sentiment is highly critical of China’s treatment of the ethnically-related Uighurs.

Xinjiang, more than any other area of China, is strategically vulnerable, partially as a result of its location in one of the most fractious neighborhoods outside the Middle East.

To control this potentially chaotic situation and to manage Sino-Russian competition for influence, China launched the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes Russia, China, the Central Asian republics, and a growing number of observers from around the region. China has pushed hard to keep the focus of the SCO on cooperative activities against the “three evils” of “separatism, fundamentalism, and terrorism,” a fear all the member states have in common.

Along some of Xinjiang’s most remote and sensitive borders are Tibet, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the disputed state of Kashmir – any one of which could quickly embroil China in an international crisis. China also tested its “all-weather” friendship with Pakistan pressuring Islamabad to crackdown on Uighur militants seeking refuge in Pakistan. Pakistan reportedly has responded by sending a number of Uighur militants to China for prosecution. Its recent stepped up attacks on terrorist groups – and especially the killing of Abdul Haq and more than a dozen other Uighur militants – has among other things assuaged relations with China.

The US intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 introduced another variable of vulnerability for China with regard to Xinjiang.

The US intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 introduced another variable of vulnerability for China with regard to Xinjiang. In the conflict that followed, global support for Al Qaeda drew in more militants to the region, including some Uighurs (as Abdul Haq’s death proved) but it also changed the strategic landscape for China. The introduction of massive US forces into the region, and especially the use of bases such as Manas in Kyrgyzstan, raised visceral and long-standing fears of encirclement by a hostile US intent on “dividing and Westernizing” China. Beijing has put pressure on Central Asian neighbors to expel or severely limit any US military presence and has refused to allow US forces to use Chinese territory for staging or overflights in the war in Afghanistan. China is also working hard to enhance cooperation with its neighbors on energy exploration, exploitation, and transportation as a way of keeping the US and Russia from monopolizing Central Asia’s voluminous oil and natural gas resources.

These competing interests, and the residual worry that the US and Russia seek to supplant or minimize Chinese influence in Central Asia will continue to contribute to Beijing’s neuralgia about assuring stability in its far Western extremity, even if the real terrorist threat to China has diminished.

* Beijing is some 1,500 miles from Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi; Urumqi is nearly another 700 miles from Kashgar on the far Western border. By contrast, Kashgar is only 250 miles from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and 500 miles from Kabul.
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Dr. Clarke is an independent China consultant. He retired in 2009 after 25 years as a China analyst and head of the China Division of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

March 19, 2010
Exiled Activist Says Uyghur Issue Crucial For Central Asia

Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress

December 09, 2009

PRAGUE/VIENNA — World Uyghur Congress President Rebiya Kadeer has told RFE/RL she is urging European politicians to focus on the fate of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang Province who continue to be persecuted and jailed, RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service reports.

Kadeer told RFE/RL by phone from Vienna that thousands of Uyghurs have been arrested, sentenced, and jailed in Xinjiang since interethnic clashes in July in the region’s capital, Urumchi, when at least 197 people were killed.

“[The Europeans] understand our problems very well — all the [European] politicians I met with said they would put Uyghur issues on their agenda,” Kadeer said. “Peace for Uyghurs means peace in Central Asia and peace in the world. And politicians in European governments, parliaments, and EU institutions said that’s why they think it’s important to put Uyghur problems on their agenda.”

Kadeer, who was imprisoned by Beijing for five years before being released in 2005, is meeting with government officials and human rights activists on a tour of European capitals that includes Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Brussels, and Paris.

She said that she is unable to travel to Central Asian countries because those governments are afraid of angering China with her visit.

Kadeer, 62, told RFE/RL that the Uyghurs — who are considered the province’s indigenous people — are currently trying to leave China for other countries in order to avoid persecution, which has worsened since the riots.

Kadeer stressed that the issue of the Uyghurs in China is important for neighboring Central Asian countries, a message she is bringing to European officials.

Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” in Mandarin Chinese, is called East Turkestan by Uyghurs after the republic that was established on the territory of Xinjiang in 1933 and 1944.

In both cases the republic was dissolved and the territory was annexed by China.

Uyghurs are a Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group.

Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs live in Central Asia’s post-Soviet republics.

https://www.rferl.org/a/Exiled_Activist_Says_Uyghur_Issue_Crucial_For_Central_Asia/1899753.html

December 10, 2009
Uyghur Pressed to Spy

2009-12-02

An exiled Uyghur returns home and finds himself in Chinese custody.

Undated photo of Kamirdin Abdurahman. Photo: RFA

HONG KONG—Authorities in China’s troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang detained a Pakistani national and member of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority for “harming public order” before asking him to infiltrate Uyghur groups back in Pakistan, the man said in a recent interview.

Kamirdin Abdurahman, 41, a second-generation Uyghur Pakistani, had returned to Xinjiang for the first time since the regional capital Urumqi was rocked by ethnic violence in July.

“I have traveled to my homeland many times since the 1980s, but this time I was surprised, shocked, and scared by what I encountered,” he said.

He said he was traveling with a group of 30 people, only some of whom were Uyghurs, who entered China via the Khonjrap border crossing on Oct. 18.

“We [Uyghurs] were isolated from the others, and waited two more hours outside. The weather was so cold,” Abdurahman said.

“Then we were checked by immigration police with a special attention that we had never met before.”

Detained 15 days

Later, police in the former Silk Road city of Kashgar, still a major center of Uyghur history and culture, confiscated his passport and blindfolded, handcuffed, and interrogated him before detaining him for 15 days, he said.

“Police said that I had spoken in negative ways, which had harmed public order,” Abdurahman said.

“I was held in detention for 15 days and fined 5,000 yuan (U.S. $732).”

After his detention, Abdurahman, who had come to visit family in the oasis town of Yarkand, near Kashgar, said he was asked by a Uyghur police officer to go back to Pakistan and spy on exiled Uyghur groups for the Chinese government.

“The day I completed my detention, three police officers, two Han Chinese and one Uyghur came to visit me,” he said.

Spying request

Abdurahman’s allegations come after Swedish security police charged a 61-year-old ethnic Uyghur man with spying for China in June, and expelled a Chinese diplomat from Stockholm, which is home to a large ethnic Uyghur community.

Exiled Uyghur groups say that China prefers to employ Uyghurs to spy on other Uyghurs because Han Chinese with a strong understanding of Uyghur language and culture are rare.

Abdurahman said the Uyghur police officer who approached him said he had paid the 5,000 yuan fine on his behalf.

“He asked me to be their friend and cooperate with them,” he said. “If I did, I would be allowed to travel freely throughout China, and my business and family visits would go more smoothly.”

Adburahman said he had agreed to cooperate in order to get out of his immediate situation, but that he had since refused to accept two subsequent phone calls.

“One of my duties was to join the Omer Uyghur Trust and report their activities, and the second duty was to watch the Uyghur community in Pakistan and submit a list of people who had attended or who might attend anti-Chinese activities,” he said.

Repeated bids to close

The Omer Uyghur Trust is a cultural organization based in Pakistan, set up with the aim of educating exiled Uyghur youth about their own culture.

The organizers say that Beijing has made repeated attempts to have the group shut down, mostly through the use of diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.

“The attempt was supported by government officials, but the courts rejected it, so we are continuing to walk towards our goal,” the group’s founder, Omer, said.

Pakistani-based Uyghurs said Abdurahman wasn’t the first to be harassed by police on visits to China.

“We have a list of Uyghurs who have been targets of threats and attempts at coercion into spying [for China],” said Akber, who is currently head of the Uyghur Trust.

“There are females and older persons among them,” he said.

“One guy, Imin Niyaz, was tortured badly. He didn’t feel safe after his return to Pakistan, so he moved to Afghanistan and is living there now,” he said.

“Abdurahman…is the only one who has revealed to the media what he encountered [in China],” Akber added.

Deadly clashes

Fierce clashes in the Xinjiang region in July between the local Muslim Uyghur community and China’s majority Han ethnic group left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 injured, according to an official toll.

China said Nov. 10 it had executed nine people over the unrest.

According to statements by the Xinjiang government, those executed included eight Uyghurs and one Han Chinese. A total of 21 people were convicted in October.

Uyghurs declared a short-lived East Turkestan Republic in Xinjiang in the late 1930s and 40s but have been ruled by Beijing, which many bitterly oppose, since 1949.

Beijing blames Uyghur separatists for sporadic bombings and other violence in the Xinjiang region.

But international rights groups have accused Beijing of using the U.S. “war on terror” as a pretext to crack down on nonviolent supporters of Uyghur independence.

Original reporting and translation by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Copyright © 1998-2009 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/spy-for-china-12022009093045.html

December 4, 2009
Obama’s Inner Kissinger

Mickey Edwards

The Iconoclast

Mickey Edwards

The Iconoclast

For more than 200 years, America’s policy makers have wrestled with the complexities of dealing with the world. George Washington, for example, thought America’s best interests were served by keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length (a view later amended more than slightly by James Monroe, who reversed the emphasis by insisting that other countries butt out of our business, the definition of “our business” being extended both north and south to include the entirety of “our” hemisphere.

John Adams suffered from a foreign policy heartburn brought about by Thomas Jefferson’s stopping just short of declaring that we were all, in our hearts, French. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Henry Kissinger, traced competing foreign policy perspectives to the idealistic Jefferson (“eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man”) and a less sentimental Alexander Hamilton, who saw “safety from external danger” as the principal consideration in determining with whom we would engage and how.

And so it has gone through the years. John Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan all drew on John Winthrop and the Bible to declare that America was a “shining city on a hill” sending out its beams to the rest of the planet, Reagan playing the pivotal role in creating a National Endowment for Democracy. Reagan edited George Kennan’s long-standing “containment policy” toward the Soviet Union and replaced it with a “rollback” campaign, which mixed the Hamiltonian pursuit of security with Jefferson’s anti-tyranny crusade. Jimmy Carter pushed for greater international respect for human rights. Even George W. Bush, who was inexplicably cavalier toward civil liberties in the United States, insisted on expanding human rights and democracy in the rest of the world, though perhaps too willing to impose, rather than promote.

And so now Barack Obama occupies the place of primacy in deciding the shape of America’s international engagement. In a world full of danger, present or emerging, whose form has this new President taken? Henry Kissinger’s.

This is a bit of a surprise. One element of Obama’s electoral appeal was the clear sense that this was a man of high ideals. There is no question that those ideals existed, and strongly, and that they guided his approach to many of the nation’s most vexing problems. If he had not exactly repeated Robert Kennedy’s “I dream of things that never were and say, ‘why not’”, he had at least given a sense of commitment to the better angels.

The thing about the presidency, though, is that one invariably finds issues more complicated than they might have appeared from the campaign trail. Here, while one’s heart may echo Jefferson, one’s responsibilities make Washington’s sense of caution more appealing. Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, is known as the most prominent modern proponent of a “realpolitik” approach toward foreign policy in which, in the end, the most important factor in deciding a national approach to other nations is quite simple: “What is in America’s interest”?

That alone is a difficult question. It was once thought to be in America’s “interest” to ally itself with some of the worst dictators on the planet: we not only allied ourselves with, but embraced, the Batistas, the Somozas, the Shahs, the Noriegas, and while those short-term alliances may have been of some use in dealing with Soviet expansionism (a real threat at the time), we have clearly paid a long-term price for such narrowness of purpose. But the world is not easy. One wishes for more democracy, more freedom, more protection from abuse in all the places where these rights are in short supply. But there are other considerations and they necessarily impinge on the decisionmaking process. In that intra-cranial showdown, it now appears that it is the “hard” side, the perceived necessity of setting aside one’s empathies, that has captured Barack Obama’s thinking.

Obama’s “Kissinger” revealed itself first when his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton went to China and declared that bringing up the unpleasantness of Chinese human rights violations would serve no useful purpose and detract from the importance of finding common ground with Beijing on various international concerns ranging from trade to climate change to North Korean nuclear weaponry (this from a woman who once went to China to protest its discriminatory policies toward women).

Our hearts may have wanted to protest the suppression of freedoms, say a word for Tibet, complain about the treatment of Uighurs, but the Administration decided it needed China for other things of more immediate concern to us. That has since been followed by a retreat from our previous confrontational approach toward Sudan where Obama now envisions a more positive policy of engagement with a government whose president has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for atrocities in Darfur.

There is no bottom-line conclusion here: in a presidency that is so young, one cannot know whether the soft line taken toward China, Sudan, Russia, and other violators of human liberties will in the end dominate Mr. Obama’s foreign policy decisions. But neither can the early signs be ignored. For the moment, it appears, Henry Kissinger is back.

(Photo: Getty Images/Hiroko Masuike)

Source: correspondents.theatlantic.com/mickey_edwards, Oct 23 2009

November 1, 2009